HOT SPRINGS ETERNAL, Part II
EDITOR’S NOTE: For the next three weeks, we will be featuring fiction by Emma Straub, Flatmancrooked’s first LAUNCH author. If you like what you read, you can invest in Emma’s future. Head over to her LAUNCH page for more details. Read Part I of this story here.
Glenwood Springs’ actual hot springs were owned and operated by the largest and most expensive hotel in town. Teddy rattled off figures from the book: Each year, more than two million people dip their toes in the naturally warm water—some for relaxation, some for healing, some for the smell!
“It does not say that.” Richard pulled his wallet out of his back pocket as they approached the entrance, which sloped down towards the basement of the hotel—it was like a water park, with gleaming turnstiles and a damp, slippery floor.
Teddy laughed, and then sniffed the air. “It’s not that bad, really.”
A dark-haired boy in his twenties manned the cash register. “Just wait.” He too had a heavy accent, and talked as if his jaw weighed fifty pounds. “Jah-st way-ate.”
Teddy raised an eyebrow. “Where are you from?”
“Czech Republic. You know Praha?” The boy was maybe twenty-one. He looked like he could have been one of Richard’s students. His hair fell in a low swoop over his forehead. The boy hopped down off his wooden stool and bent over to reach a stack of thin, well-worn towels.
“Is your name really Bill?” Everyone under the age of thirty in the entire town seemed to have a nametag and a voice that moved like molasses. Bill’s nametag was pinned to the back pocket of his jeans.
“Yah, like Billy the Kid?” Bill smiled a sideways smile, first at Teddy, and then, after a moment, at Richard. “Don’t stay in hot tub too long.” He took another moment to drink them in, to see if he had judged right. “Party tonight at hostel, on Grand Av-noo.” He slid their towels across the counter, and then reached down and grabbed two more, and piled them on top. “Extra,” Billy the Kid said. “For friends.” Richard thought he saw Teddy’s tongue snake across his lower lip.
The slick floor led through the basement of the hotel, past changing rooms and lockers. Armed with their extra towels, Teddy followed Richard through the swinging doors, out to the pool.
The scene reminded Richard of a nightclub, the kind of place he’d spent his adult life trying to avoid; the kind of place with go-go boys standing on pedestals, dancing in nothing but their underwear. It was the energy of the place, the thick cloud of steam over the surface of the water, all the people, people, people. Richard turned around to find Teddy’s mouth open.
“Come on, you,” Richard said. Plastic lounge chairs with colorful towels draped over them lined the pool, which stretched all the way back towards the mountains. “Let’s get smelly.”
The truth was, though, that the smelliness had subsided. Even though the air was warm, now down to the mid-seventies, the water was warmer, and looked inviting. They found unoccupied chairs halfway down one side of the pool, which stretched on interminably, bigger than Olympic-sized. Over their heads, dark, craggy outlines of mountains loomed and seemed far away. The sky was all that was above them.
“Shall we?” Richard asked, but Teddy was already jogging on the pads of his feet towards the shallow steps.
The pool was jammed. At the shallow end, by Teddy’s wet calves, a boy in water wings paddled on his stomach. Richard took a step into the water, and felt the warmth close around his left ankle, and then his right. He couldn’t imagine coming in the daytime, what that would be like. It seemed appropriate to submerge oneself in the darkness, as if floating through the giant, open sky. He let the water take him, inch by inch. A body’s length ahead, Teddy was already on his back with his arms outstretched, oblivious to the crowds walking heavily and slowly swimming around his prostrate form.
The small boy’s father appeared when Richard was up to his bellybutton, the water swishing in and out like an overflowing drain. Richard’s body had never been taut—fit, perhaps, at various points, but never precisely taut. The boy’s father was just that; it must have made for an easier canvas. Tattooed across his ribcage, there was a six-inch portrait of the Bride of Frankenstein, her hair standing on end. The man leaned down to scoop up his son, and as he carried him off, feet kicking and splashing, Richard saw Frankenstein’s monster himself on the man’s other side—the couple separated forever by his lungs.
Teddy floated closer, using his hands as oars. “Let’s move here,” he said. “I want to live in the rotten eggs.” His wet hair waved under the surface, electric.
“You got it, sister.” Richard took Teddy’s feet in his hands and plunged forward, sending them both towards the deep end.
It had taken Richard exactly three months to tell Robin what the problem was. He’d spent his first dozen sessions calmly describing his issues with University hierarchy, the Bush administration, and his younger sister’s manic procreation. But Teddy was always there, lurking quietly in the back of his throat, somewhere near his uvula.
“There is this one thing,” Richard started. It had to do with Florida, and sugar, and Teddy’s mother. Robin nodded. The window behind her looked out onto Twenty-Second Street, and Richard could see people’s heads bobbing along as they walked their dogs and talked on the phone. He’d had other boyfriends before, though nothing as serious, and certainly nothing as long. He thought about how funny it would be to see one of them walk by, just then, how he could take that as a sign, and run out the door, winding up in someone’s unsuspecting arms. Oh, the thrill! In Richard’s life, there seemed to be no cinematic flourish. Maybe that’s what he was missing. Maybe that’s what they had on the open road. “He’s not, I don’t know, worldly.” Teddy, on the other hand, had had a string of boyfriends: actors, the other dancers, limber, elegant smokers. All of Teddy’s friends had probably laughed when he first introduced them to Richard. They had probably guffawed. He probably reminded them of their parents.
“Worldly?” Robin had no doubt learned this trick on her first day of therapist school. She was excellent at repeating back key words and phrases. She took a slurp of Mountain Dew, and crossed her arms over her stomach, clutching her turkey-leg forearms.
“He never wants to go to Paris, or to the symphony, or read poems.” Richard looked at the spines of the books on Robin’s shelves, at the cross around her neck. There was a gurgle in his stomach. He wondered what kind of books Robin read in her spare time, if she read at all. He couldn’t imagine her doing the crossword puzzle, or playing Scrabble, or leaping out of her chair to let a poem spill from her lips. He knew what she was going to say.
“And how do you feel about that?”
“I feel like I’m always the one pushing us to do the things I want to do. It would be nice to have him just do them, you know, without my having to ask.” Richard closed his eyes for a minute. Sometimes he and Robin did that together, at the end of their sessions. At first, he thought she was insane, and only did it to humor her. Now he closed his eyes at the drop of a hat: on the subway platform, at the dinner table, in bed. Robin called it “taking stock.” Richard called it “the no Teddy zone,” but only to himself. Sometimes Richard would open his eyes and find Teddy staring at him, mystified.
“And how do you say that?” Robin’s legs were crossed at the ankle. Her sandals were beige, like the carpet. Everything in her office was as neutral as possible. Richard liked that about her; she had chosen to choose nothing personal.
“What do you mean? I tell him exactly that, that it wouldn’t kill him to think about someone else for a change. That after five years, he should know what day the garbage goes out, and to send my sister’s kids birthday cards every year and not just when he feels like it.” Richard took a tissue out of the box on Robin’s desk and ripped it into tiny little pieces.
Teddy was a crier. He cried at television programs, and intermittently during his daily phone calls with his mother. This had alarmed Richard in the beginning of their relationship, but he’d gotten used to it. On the sliding scale of bodily functions, it was something like a sneeze. The major problem was that Teddy left used tissues in every room of the house, tissues which Richard would then have to pick up and throw away. It also meant that no matter who had started the argument, or who was at fault, Richard would end up apologizing.
“Uh huh,” Robin said. “I see.”
On the opposite edge of the pool, several older ladies in bathing caps sat in what looked like something out of an S and M club. Shallow chaise lounges made out of metal tubes stood submerged some ten inches beneath the surface of the pool, where bathers could experience all the pleasure of the hot springs without the bother of physical exertion. Richard and Teddy watched, only their faces out of the water, while one of the ladies rose, dripping, from the pool and shuffled around to the back of her chair, where she popped in a quarter. A moment later, bubbles erupted in her empty chair, turning the area into a one-person Jacuzzi.
“Oh, my god,” Teddy said. “Me next.” He held Richard’s hand under water, and for a moment, when Teddy’s long fingers closed around his fist, Richard was in love, just like that. They tread water, their shorts ballooning upward, and waited for a turn. Across the pool, a young couple swam by, their eyes masked by large, square goggles. The girl paused to readjust her bathing suit, and after giving her strap a tug, swam up to her boyfriend’s face and gave him a kiss. Their goggles bumped together. It was like a commercial for the place: Love in the Time of Sulphur.
Teddy had to pee, and scooted over to a staircase. He had a funny, slightly ducky walk, another remnant from his days as a dancer, more side-to-side than up-and-down, and it was even sillier when he was dripping wet in his slightly-too-small bathing trunks. Had his stomach ever looked that way before? Richard stayed put and watched the ladies’ feet bob under the surface. One of them closed her eyes, and so he did, too. He pictured Robin’s office filled with water. There was a breeze coming from the mountains, blowing down the river that was directly behind the hotel. His face was cool and dark. In Richard’s imagination, he was so dark that he was invisible. When Teddy came back, splashing loudly, he was smiling.
“Billy the Kid is going to come over later,” he said, and took a hit off an imaginary joint. “Before the party.”
“You really want to go to that? A party full of kids?” Richard was old; he sounded old. But he couldn’t help it. He was their teacher, not their friend. They wouldn’t have invited him without Teddy; without Teddy, he wouldn’t have gone. It was obvious.
“Well, yeah.” Teddy looked offended. “Why, you don’t? It’s like EPCOT center. Kids get sent here from all over. It’s going to be fun.” He ran a hand across his head, slicking his hair back into a short paintbrush. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, and the stubble was starting to turn into something slightly angry.
“What if, after this, we walked up to Doc Holliday’s grave? It’s just a few blocks from the Seashore. Isn’t that more fun than going to a party with a bunch of kids?” Richard straightened his legs, and half his body rose out of the water. Steam came off his skin. If he were a woman, people would ask if he was pregnant. If he were a woman, people would ask if he was Teddy’s mother. The five years between them had stretched into ten or fifteen. Still under the water up to his neck, Teddy rolled his eyes. “Of course you’d say that.”
One of the old ladies’ bubbles were up. Teddy scrambled into the empty chair, and popped a quarter into the machine, leaving Richard steaming alone.
“Five minutes,” Teddy said, with ten feet of pool between them. “Let’s talk about it in five minutes.” He closed his eyes.
They stayed until the pool closed, and someone—Billy the Kid, maybe—shut all the lights off, and only the stars perked up the inky sky.
When Teddy decided to move in, he did it all at once, not gradually, like their friends’ boyfriends, who seemed to move one article of clothing at a time. Teddy and his U-Haul blocked traffic on Twenty-Fourth Street for an hour and a half, during which time he made Richard stand in front, apologizing to motorists. Richard had found the whole thing very romantic. Teddy didn’t care about pissing people off. He just wanted to move in as quickly as possible; their love was that important. Or at least that’s what Richard thought at the time. It turned out later that the van was a loaner from work and needed to be back after lunch. Still, Richard loved to picture Teddy breathlessly running up and down the stairs holding a lamp, a suitcase, a stack of loose papers from his desk. The honking horns and angry cabdrivers were all just part of the scenery. Richard never closed his eyes then, not even when they kissed.
Only when they were out of the pool did the smell begin to magnify, to multiply and cover every inch of their skin. When Richard stepped out of the pool he wrapped a towel around his chest, all the way up to his armpits.
“So, are we going to walk up to the cemetery? Do you want to?” Richard was thinking positively. If he sounded relaxed, then Teddy would react more favorably.
“What? No, we’re going to the party. I already told Billy.” Teddy’s face turned hard. He looked like a clay statue, still wet. There was more to cut away.
“Teddy, come on. You don’t really want to go. Don’t be stupid.” Richard knew instantly that this was a mistake.
“No, Richard, you don’t want to go. And you know what, you don’t have to.” Teddy had a towel wrapped loosely around his waist, and when he dropped it to the ground, he didn’t stop to pick it up. He just kept walking. Richard stopped and let him go, watching his shirtless upper half move side to side, side to side, until he turned into the hall towards the exit, and was gone.
Robin said that Richard would have to decide, that she couldn’t decide for him. There were a number of things that Richard knew Teddy loved about him—stability and responsibility chief among them. He gave practical gifts. He did not believe in three-ways. He believed in taking out the garbage. These were not exciting features. And what did Richard love about Teddy? If Richard was the earth, Teddy was the sky. If the room was beige, then Richard was beige. Teddy couldn’t be beige if his life depended on it. Instead of stupid, the word ‘carefree.’ The word ‘open-minded.’ The word ‘romantic.’ If he tried to phrase it for someone else, the vocabulary came more readily to his tongue.
Richard walked the three blocks down Grand Avenue towards the hostel. He wanted to go to Doc Holliday’s grave and pull a gun out of the ground. He wanted to send all the beautiful boys and girls back to their respective countries. He wanted to widen his stance and stomp in and terrify everyone with his presence. He thought, maybe if they’d gone to the grave, maybe Teddy would have said something so brilliant, and so thoughtful, that Richard would never have to wonder again. He pictured Robin standing at the gates to the cemetery, cheering him on like he was finishing a marathon, headstones streaming by him in streaks of silver and gold.
The Glenwood Springs Hostel was in a one-story yellow house. There was a hand-painted sign with a bright sun in the upper left-hand corner. Faded Tibetan prayer flags ran the length of the porch, and hung low enough that Richard had to stoop to get to the front door. A kayak on its side leaned lazily against the wall, as if pointing the way.
Inga-from-Sweden was off duty, manning the makeshift bar in the entrance-way and chatting with two dread-locked teenagers in patchwork pants. She waved at Richard, who gave a weak wave back. Inga was the kind of girl who’d wave at anyone. She was still wearing her nametag. Without being asked, she nodded in the direction of a doorway. Other people’s boyfriends had done this before.
Teddy was in the living room, nestled into a deep, stained couch, his legs tucked up beneath him like a child. He was wearing someone else’s t-shirt, and it stretched absurdly across his chest. Richard pictured Teddy walking in, wet and stinking, and wanted to cry. Billy the Kid sat next to Teddy on the couch, too close. They were laughing. In a funny way, they reminded Richard of the way he and Teddy must have looked when they met, only with Teddy playing Richard’s part—older, wiser, broader.
“Theodore,” Richard started.
Teddy looked up. It didn’t matter that he’d been laughing—when he saw Richard, his eyes were wet. “You came,” he said. Richard could see it, suddenly, that Teddy was too old for this too, that he had been coming along, slowly, a step behind Richard. He was wearing someone else’s t-shirt. Who lived in this place? Richard took a step forward, and then paused. There were other people in the room—not Marlene Dietrich, but girls like her, girls with low voices, and boys, god, the young, beautiful boys. It didn’t matter. None of them mattered. Teddy sat up straight, eyes locked on Richard’s.
“Here,” Richard said, peeling off his own damp t-shirt, the pale expanse of his belly now exposed. He wanted Teddy back; he was sure. Richard held his shirt out. “Put this on.”
by Emma Straub
